“How do we Know we are who we think we are?”

Abstract

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Maritime Gothic novel ends far away from the small Nova Scotia town of New Waterford, Cape Breton Island, in an apartment in Harlem, New York, where the secret histories of a New Waterford dynasty stretching over four generations are finally laid out to view as names written on the family tree. A young Afro-Canadian ethnomusicologist and a middle-aged white woman who have never met before discover that they are cousins (their mothers were sisters) and the novel ends with the woman, Lily Piper, inviting the young man, Anthony Piper, to “sit down and have a cuppa tea while I tell you about your mother” (p. 566). This invitation throws the reader back to the opening of the novel, for it is Lily’s voice that begins the narrative as it loops back into the past: “They’re all dead now” (p. 1).

He opens his knapsack and takes out a sealed cardboard tube. “When Miss Piper died, she left me a note with your name and address, and instructions for me to give you this personally.”

He hands the tube to Lily. She breaks the seal at one end and withdraws a paper scroll. She spreads it out on the table.

Anthony asks, “What is it?”

“It’s the family tree,” Lily says. “Look. We’re all in it.”

Rose flicks off the TV, scuffs over on her dilapidated slippers, fishes for her glasses.

“I don’t understand.”

“There you are, there.”

Lily points to the issue of Frances Euphrasia and Leo (Ginger). Sprouting from the union of their branches is his name in green ink, “Anthony (Aloysius).”

(Fall on Your Knees, p. 565)¹